Will Zenbe forever be?
I woke-up to this following email this morning:
Dear ********@zenbe.com,
On February 28, 2010, we will turn off the free Zenbe Personal Mail service (the one with the green background). After February 28, 2010 you will no longer be able to login to your ********@zenbe.com account on Zenbe Personal, or access it via POP or IMAP.
We greatly enjoyed creating an innovative, free email service and receiving excellent feedback from users like you. We are a small team committed to building well-designed, high-quality products. Like all small businesses, we’ve had to adapt to the needs of our users and the demands of the market. To do that effectively we built a vastly improved version of Zenbe Mail from the ground up. We run it in a top-tier data center and focus heavily on reliability, performance, and individualized customer support. We also bundle in our acclaimed Shareflow product that offers a truly unique approach to group communication.
We listened to your feedback and worked hard to keep the original, free personal email product available to existing users as long as we could, even as we moved forward with our new email product and other premium services. However, we no longer feel we can provide the quality of service and support we aspire to for the free email product. We want to be up-front with our free users, and give you the information and tools you need to move to a new email service.
We are proud of the new and improved Zenbe Mail. It’s not free, but it’s affordable. We hope you take a look at the new design and features. If you decide to sign up, use the promo code UPGRADE50 and you’ll receive 50% off your first three months of service.
We do recognize that you have many choices and may wish to find a different free email service. We’ve written a detailed migration guide that describes how to move your Zenbe data, regardless of which service you choose. We encourage you to use the comments section there to share any migration tips with other Zenbe users.
Zenbe Personal Migration Guide
It may take up to a few days to move all your email from Zenbe to a new service so please read through the guide soon.
Feel free to use the comments section on the announcement page or migration guide to ask any questions, or email us for specific help at migration@zenbe.zendesk.com.
Sincerely,
The Zenbe Team
How sweet of them to inform their trusted beta testers that our job is done and we are not needed anymore. You would assume that at least the early users would be able to keep their email address, right? Apparently my assumption was dead wrong here.
I understand that hosting an email service is not cheap and easy, but this is not how you should treat any customer, paying or not.
You first ask people to join up and test the product, then you just toss them to the gutter; unless they pay of course.
If that was not enough, you have only one month to migrate and see to it that you are settled in with a new email address.
I am now very glad I chose to migrate early to GMX before this bullshit was decided. I would not care if they gave me six months, but one month is ridiculous. I am sure there are other users who find this more frustrating than me.
I would never pay for Zenbe as they have actually turned off the folder feature in imap. That is kind of the main thing with imap, that you can have folders and easily organise your emails.
It would be interesting to see Google or GMX pull a stunt like that; see how many customers they would have left.
Thank you Zenbe Team for letting me test your email, but do not bother asking me for any more help.
